12 Incredible Pure CSS Experiments

You may know CSS as a language for simply styling your website, but it’s capable of a whole lot more than you might think. From photorealistic images to even video games, you’ll be shocked to see what a great developer can accomplish with just CSS.

There are all sorts of filters and effects here, all open source and available for use in a web design project. These modules are JavaScript and mostly HTML-free. That means they’re more lightweight than you’d expect. Check out these amazing pure CSS experiments, and maybe try a few for yourself.

Wow! If you love space, you’re going to be blown away by this solar system animated with CSS. This isn’t just a pretty animation either; each planet accurately revolves around the sun relative to an actual Earth year.

Animations are a notorious problem-causer for websites. If poorly optimized, they can cause a big slowdown. This beautiful animated gradient is extremely lightweight, not to mention easy to edit and add your own colors.

You don’t need JavaScript to make a game. It may be simple, but the pure CSS Stack Game is fun to play with and the graphics are pretty nice too. This couldn’t have been easy, but it just goes to show what a little CSS is capable of.

You can make art with HTML and CSS! Francine is an 18th-century styled painting made and displayed purely with code. And yet it looks no different than any other traditionally created piece of artwork.

Similar to Francine, this phone was created using nothing more than CSS and HTML. Yet it looks like any other photo on a website! If you’re interested, you can play with the code and see how this experiment was created.

This is pretty cool: Change the color of an image with nothing but CSS and the color picker tool from your computer.

Small, Responsive and Beautiful

A lot of the amazing effects you see on a website can be attributed to JavaScript. But sadly, JS isn’t always the most lightweight solution. However, you might be surprised what CSS is capable of. And, if made correctly, it can often have far less of an impact on performance.

Either way, it’s interesting to see all the creative ideas CSS developers can come up with. These experiments were made by some real innovative developers, so go give them some love, and let us know which one you thought was the coolest!